On Wednesday night I had to run to the drug store. We were out of antihistamine, and, being springtime, the air in Chicago is thick with stuff that makes me sneeze.

There’s a Walgreens around the corner from our house. As I walked up to the entrance, I saw a man holding a sign in Spanish, but headlined with “Please help.” He had three young children with him, the oldest appearing to be no more than 7 or 8.

The drug store was surprisingly busy—maybe a lot of us found our antihistamine supply was low that night?—and I saw a few people walk by the family: stiffly, uncomfortably, hands in pockets.

But then I saw one neighbor, a Jewish man, who walked up to them and asked, “What do you need?” “Food for the baby,” the eldest daughter said. “Ok.” He went inside and, as he shopped for other things, I saw that he bought a gift card for the store, which he gave to them on his way out. Inspired by his example, I did the same.

As I gave the card to the father, several things flashed through my mind at once: Questions, of course, about what led this family to be in this situation, begging outside a Walgreen’s after 9 pm. Questions about where they would sleep that night. Questions about their legal status and how governmental policies and actions were affecting them. Questions about whether in aiding this family my neighbor and I might, naively, be sticking our own necks out.

But what also went through my mind was something I took to heart years ago from Pope Francis, who died this week. Like other people, I find my mind often generates reasons not to give when I see someone asking for money on the street. I imagine they might spend it on something unwholesome, or that I’m being conned. But among the late pope’s most moving teachings was that if someone is asking, we should make it a habit to err on the side of giving. Simply put, giving to someone in need “is always right,” he said.

Parashat Shemini includes a horrible story. For weeks we have read about the Israelites’ construction and inauguration of the Mishkan, a long process that reaches its climax at the opening of the Torah portion. Aaron performs all the prescribed rituals just as they had been commanded. There is perfect alignment between the Divine and human will, between intention and outcome. It’s a scene of blessing, culminating in the people shouting for joy and prostrating themselves.

And then, of course, it all goes wrong. Aaron’s sons, Nadav and Avihu, go off script and lose their lives in the process. Aaron is bereft, silent. Moses, who we also imagine to be shattered at the loss of his nephews, becomes focused on the rules to be followed in this complicated case. In chapter 10 he channels his energy into articulating, in painstaking detail, exactly what sacrifices are to be eaten and where. When, in the course of all this, he “investigates deeply” (darosh darash), he finds that the burnt offering was eaten improperly, and he becomes angry with Eleazar and Itamar, Aaron’s surviving children, castigating them for their failure.

Aaron responds to Moses, “Look, today they brought forward their offense offering and their burnt offering before YHVH, and things of this sort befell me. Had I eaten an offense offering today, would it have seemed good in the eyes of YHVH?” Now it is Moses who is silent: “Moses heard, and it seemed good in his eyes.” Rashi, following other traditional commentaries, reads this as a dialogue about the complex halakhic status of Aaron, who is navigating both his responsibilities to the dead and his special role as High Priest. Robert Alter, whose translation I followed here, offers a more straightforward and, to my mind, compelling reading: “The grieving father asks his own brother whether God could really expect him to constrain himself to ingest meat in this moment of his grief”—that is, to follow the prescribed rules in spite of his natural, human emotional need—”and Moses concedes that Aaron is right.”

There is much we could say here—about regulations and emotions, about the duties of office and the duties and realities of personal mourning, about the varied ways we respond to enormous personal loss. As I reflect on my experience outside the drug store the other night, I find my ruminations hovering around the ways our religious practices can suppress or channel our heart-minds. Sometimes these dynamics can serve us well (for instance, if we’re angry at someone), and sometimes they can serve us poorly (if we excuse our not giving to someone in need by a rule-based tale we tell ourselves). In my own life and in the lives of many others, I have found the structure of Jewish law to be an enormously helpful anchor during the storm of grief. But, like all structures—which are expressions of gevura, limitation and boundedness—these rules can, if misapplied, smother our hesed, the holy font of loving connection.

One other thing went through my mind outside Walgreen’s on Wednesday night: It was the beginning of Yom HaShoah. In the current political environment, I found it hard not to imagine what could potentially befall this family—and what, perhaps, contributed to the banal, if slightly uncomfortable, indifference so many people seemed to demonstrate as they walked by a father and three small children with a cardboard sign that plaintively asked, “Please help.”

The lessons of the Shoah are too many and too numerous to discuss here, at the end of my weekly message. But drawing on the story of Aaron and Moses in our Torah portion, I would suggest that we all can and should be checking in with ourselves: As a people defined by a commitment to law and justice, and as citizens in a democratic republic who therefore each bear a portion of the collective sovereign power, are the laws we live by diminishing or enhancing the image of God? Do our actions, as individuals and as a society, cultivate cruelty or compassion? Are our hearts becoming harder or softer?

The high point of the inauguration of the Mishkan—the high point, perhaps, of the entire Torah—achieved just before everything goes so wrong, is blessing: “Moses and Aaron then went into the tent of meeting. When they came out, they blessed the people; and the glory of YHVH appeared to all the people” (Lev. 9:23). This is a fulfillment of God’s promise to Abraham: “And you shall be a blessing” (Gen. 12:2). The simple question we should ask ourselves all the time is: Is my action, is our action, a blessing in the world?

Last month I was honored to share some words of Torah during a plenary session at the convention of the Central Conference of American Rabbis in Chicago, alongside two wonderful colleagues: Rabbi Yael Vurgan and Dr. Claire Sufrin. The three of us were asked to spend 15 minutes each sharing a text that has helped us cultivate resilience over these recent difficult months. 

The text I taught came from Rabbi Menachem Nachum of Chernobyl’s Meor Einayim, along with a poem by Rabbi Rachel Barenblatt. You can view the sources here and you can watch my talk—along with the other two talks—at this link, using the password: ccar2025. My talk is first.

The other day I found myself thinking back five years, to the first Pesach we celebrated during the Covid pandemic. I remembered the strange feeling of loneliness and isolation. I remembered how families struggled to figure out whether and how they could do “Zoom seders” (and, frequently, how they would manage to get less tech-savvy relatives into the “room”). I remembered the unusual experience of cooking just for my family and no guests. Perhaps you remember that time, too.

I also remember that Pesach 2020 afforded new insight into what it might have felt like for our ancestors to seek protection inside their homes as a plague raged beyond the threshold. Home became even more of a refuge than it normally is, and in those early days many folks went to even more extraordinary lengths to keep their homes pure: Wiping down items from the grocery store before they came into the kitchen, keeping repair workers standing at a distance beyond the front door. While I had an academic sense of purity rituals before Covid, Pesach 2020 provided a deeper understanding.

Purity is, of course, a theme of Passover. In ancient times, in order to offer the Pesach sacrifice one had to be in a state of ritual purity (tahor). At the same time, offering that sacrifice was a sacred duty of every Israelite. So what happens if, through no fault of your own, you’re ritually impure at Pesach and can’t offer the sacrifice? In Numbers 9 we find the highly unusual provision of Pesach Sheni, a make-up opportunity: you offer the sacrifice a month later. No other communal observance quite compares. (If you were ritually impure for the make-up, then you’re out of luck. There’s a limit.)

While we don’t offer a Pesach sacrifice these days, the impulse toward purity remains a deep part of Pesach for many. Most prominently that shows up in the way we relate to chametz. In his very first entry on the laws of Pesach, Maimonides writes, “Anyone who intentionally eats an olive’s size of chametz on Pesach… is liable for karet, being spiritually cut off from the Jewish people, as Exodus 12:15 states: ‘Whoever eats leaven… will have his soul cut off.'” Likewise, he subsequently reminds us, it is forbidden to own or derive benefit from chametz on Pesach (though this prohibition doesn’t carry quite as high a penalty).

In many Jewish homes, including my own, all of this serves to make the atmosphere thick with a sense of purity and impurity around Pesach. Many Jews want to get the chametz out of their homes. Stories are told of Jewish mothers and grandmothers (permit me to gender essentialize for a moment—though in my own house this character would be played by me) who ruthlessly police the household for wayward children munching on a sandwich or a cookie after the kitchen has been kashered. The slightest trace of impurity is a threat.

All of which has, I think, given purity a bit of a bad rap. Certainly it can be misapplied. A focus on purity can, of course, lead to a heavy emphasis on policing the boundaries and thus to exclusion, persecution, and worse—see the Nazi racial purity laws, American laws against miscegenation, or Pharaoh’s own maniacal effort to eradicate Jewish baby boys, for textbook examples. Yet in the appropriate wariness to purity many of us have developed in response to these abuses, I think we may have left behind some good things.

In a recent talk at the Insight Meditation Center in Redwood City, Gil Fronsdal pointed toward what we might experience in a healthy approach to purity. After he first began meditating in a monastery, Gil shared, he “started feeling this amazing sense of purity within. And I could feel that if I had certain thoughts that were not so pure, how it was a kind of violence… that shut down this place of purity that felt so healthy and good, that felt like home in a way… I felt free from a lot of the kind of inner conflict, the way that greed and hatred were a kind of a loss of freedom because they become compulsions that are difficult to put down, they drive us. And so there’s a kind of freedom from living with a deep sense of virtue.”

As I listened to Gil’s talk, it struck me this kind of purity was akin to the deeper spiritual experience of the practices of purity and impurity that surround Pesach. Chametz, of course, is not only about the food—it’s about the inner chametz too, the inner compulsions that keep us from being truly free servants of the Divine. The practice of eating matzah can be understood as an invitation to “flatten” ourselves—to let go of ego and self-centeredness. Maimonides himself reminds us that the commandment to destroy and rid ourselves of all chametz in our possession is not simply a physical or legal maneuver, but ultimately involves the work of the heart: “What is the destruction to which the Torah refers? To nullify chametz within one’s heart and to consider it as dust, and to resolve within the heart that one possesses no chametz at all: all the chametz in one’s possession being as dust and as a thing of no value whatsoever.” (Laws of Chametz and Matzah 2:2).

While I have no desire to return to Pesach 2020, nor to descend into the oppressive potentialities of a discourse of purity and impurity, the tradition invites us into this richer spiritual experience of reclaiming purity as a form of recalibrating what we hold onto and what we let go of. My sense is that, in some communities at least, while observing the Seder ritual remains a central part of Pesach, for many folks this notion of giving up ownership of our chametz—either by giving it away or by selling it to someone who isn’t Jewish or doing the true heart-work of relinquishing our claim of ownership over it and thus its claim of ownership over us—is not as front of mind.

So this year, as issues of borders and possession and purity swirl powerfully around us in current events, I suggest we step into the challenge and invitation of our tradition—that alongside the physical work of preparation, we do the heart-work as well. For Jews, Liberation Day is not a political slogan, and it is not limited to questions of economic or political freedom. It should not be about nationalism or racism or other oppressive misapplications of purity. For Jews, Liberation Day is Pesach, the time when we see ourselves as once again leaving the political and spiritual constraints of the stifling confines of Egypt. To leave behind that constriction and step into our freedom—that is an experience of genuine, wholesome purity. May we experience it this year.

A few years ago I received an email from Joe Reimer, a professor emeritus of Jewish education at Brandeis, with a request: to be part of a small working group supported by the Mandel Center for Jewish Education at Brandeis that would focus on the teaching and learning of Jewish spirituality. Certainly because of the people who would be involved, and possibly because of my own predilection to say yes to good ideas too quickly, I happily decided to join.

The lens of the study ultimately became trained on the study of Hasidic texts in adult Jewish education settings. There were six of us in the group and we met on zoom for a year (I’m writing this before securing everyone’s permission to share names, so I’m keeping them private). In each session one of us took a turn sharing a reflection on our own experiences of teaching Hasidic texts, standing both inside the experience and on the balcony looking down on it. We practiced noticing and asking questions, and we started to develop a bit of shared language.

After a few months, Joe shared that the Mandel Center was interested in hosting a convening on the topic, and we started to think about a gathering. Then October 7 came, and we, like so many others, were thrown. Our sessions, which from the beginning included one Israeli, became a time to connect and to process the shared pain and grief of the world. We pushed back our plan for a convening by a year.

This week the convening finally happened, with 23 participants from various backgrounds, institutions, and communities. I was especially delighted that so many current and former IJS faculty members were among the group. (You can read more about it here.)

By design, the convening was a space for not only some incredible teaching of Hasidic texts by some of the most talented teachers I know, but also reflection on what’s happening when we teach those texts. And, straddling the worlds of academe and spiritual practice, it also included meditation, singing niggunim, and teaching modes like movement improvisation that helped us play with what we might think of as boundaries between disciplines or realms.

At one point, pulling me back into the real world for a moment, a participant asked me, “How do you justify this kind of thing to your board and your funders?” I honestly hadn’t considered the question that much, perhaps because the Mandel Center was able to foot the lion’s share of the bill. Still, we were making a significant investment in the time of our faculty, which is precious. So the question has been sitting with me.

“And the Holy One called to Moses, and God spoke to him from the Tent of Meeting, saying:” (Leviticus 1:1). Rashi’s first comment on this verse—his first comment on the Book of Leviticus—reads as follows: “Before every Divine speech act, before every utterance of the Holy One, before every instruction-invitation (tzivui, as in mitzvah—JF), there is a call, the language of affection, the language used by the Ministering Angels: ‘They call one to the other’ (Isaiah 6:3).”

I sometimes hear from Jews that it can feel weird to invoke the language of “calling” or “vocation” (which also means calling) to describe our relationship with the Holy One or the way we came to the professions or relationships to which we’ve dedicated ourselves. Particularly in English, it can feel Christian. And yet—with affection for, but not apology to, my Christian colleagues and friends—this is one of those things we Jews had first. The experience of calling is a central aspect of Jewish life, as suggested in the very name of the central book of the Torah: Vayikra, “And God called.”

Teachers, whether they work in public schools or at universities or in synagogues or at IJS, confront a unique set of challenges when it comes to calling. Those of us who teach texts, yours truly included, often start teaching because we love studying these texts and want to share our love of them with others. If we have some skill, and if we’re blessed to be in the right environment, we come to experience that innate desire as a calling, and we learn to help those we teach discern the voice of the Divine calling to them (you) in the course of Torah study.

Yet like so many other passions in a world that demands economic productivity, teaching can become more labor than love, and that flame of an initial calling can die to an ember if it isn’t tended. Which is why teachers, like all of us, need regular opportunities to renew their sense of vocation, to get quiet enough to hear the roar of the still small voice, to blow air on the embers and add fuel to the fire. In quotidian terms, we call that professional development. In the more majestic register of Torah, we might call it hitchadshut, an act of making new again. That’s my answer.

On one level, particularly as we approach the Passover seder, I’m tempted to say that we’re all teachers and we’re all learners—which is true, we are. But I also think it’s important to lift up the unique skills and talents and experience it takes to do particular types of teaching. Not anyone can teach a high school chemistry class, and not anyone can teach the Sefat Emet. It takes work and preparation, and most significantly it takes a sense of deep love and affection—a sense of calling.

Your call is different than mine. Each of us is on a particular path, which is part of what makes life rich and wonderful. Yet all of us can experience a calling—to forms of work, to types of service, to particular relationships, to Torah and mitzvot. Like many of my colleagues at the convening this week, a large part of the work I have found myself called to do is to help you and one another and as many people as we can to sense and renew their experience of calling through the extraordinary teachings of our tradition.